The Sports: SURFING JUST LIKE THEY DO IN THE U.S.A.

The Sports SURFING JUST LIKE THEY DO IN THE U.S.A.

Sporting Life Breaks Oat Of the Antipodes

by

Richard Rlegel

Rocketing up the Stouffer’s Cincinnati Towers by express elevator, I’m attempting to frame an equally hasty explanation for Steve Cummings of the Sports, as to just where it was that I heard Tom Robinson and Eric Burdon in his vocals when I Rock-a-Ramaed his group’s U.S. debut album, Don’t Throw Stones, a couple of months before. I had dashed off that Rama in a few minutes of some deadline midnight dreary, and when I had more time to live with the album later, I found it just as exhilarating (and still just as Graham Parkerish) as I had already promised in print, but the redoubtable Messrs. Robinson and Burdon seemed hardly audible within its grooves.

Putting the joys of Kerouacian spontaneous bop prosody behind me for the moment, I race on toward my meeting with Cummings. The Sports played Cleveland’s Agora last night, and spent all of this afternoon seeing the U.S.A. by Chevrolet j(or whatever), as they motored the 250 monotonous miles down 1-71 to their next show. When the band got into townr Manager Michael Gudinski phoned, but suggested that I not come over to their hotel immediately, as Steve Cummings wanted some time to indulge what had apparently become a habit for him on this North American tour, walking around each new city to get its feel.

Yve noticed how so many Americans are so...so positive.

When I arrive at Cummings’ hotel room, he’s just returned from his tactile constitutional, and looks flushed with excitement at something he’s seen out on the streets. Somewhat slighter than his album cover photos promised, but just as vulnerably handsome, Cummings is crouched on the side of his bed, nursing the cold he’s acquired in the U.S.’s harsh December climate, antipodal to the pleasant midsummer” sun waiting for him back in his native Melbourne. When we’ve exchanged introductions, I begin to realize that Cummings’ excitement is actually shyness and nervousness over meeting me, as though I were the potential rockstar of this encounter.

But Cummings quickly comes up with a query so charming that it disarms any uneasiness either of us may be feelihg: “Are there many black people in Cincinnati?” Instantly I can see just how it was out on.his walk, Cummings in his black leather jacket, his five-o’clock-shadowed, “foreign” face open-eyed as he walked through crowds of well-dressed, well-fed Negro Christmas shoppers, before the brightly-lit stores. Cincinnati, U.S.A., must have looked a bit like one of Eric Burdon’s (so this is where the guy comes in) visions of the Millennium.

And, as Cummings relates the history of the Sports, the tale sounds as archetypal as Burdon’s, or practically any other British Commonwealth rocker’s, that familiar climb that starts with collecting American R&B records, and culminates in fact-finding tours of the R&B cradle itself. Like so many of us world citizens, Cummings was brought home to rock’n’roll by the Beatles’ 1964 breakthrough, an event that caught him up at the nicely impressionable age of eleven. By adolescence, Cummings had moved on to newer rock heroes: the Move, Traffic, and perhaps his permanent passion, theKinksr

Still, Cummings initially avoided emulating his musical idols, choosing instead to go steady with Anglo-rock’s first cousin, the eternal art school, where he applied himself to the serious business of painting. But good-guy rock’n’roll won out (don’t ask about the dropout rate at the art schools these Anglo musicians favor), and by the mid-70’s Cummings had formed a band to begin living out the rock ideals his intensive record collecting had planted in him. The Sports began playing professionally in Melbourne’s pubs and hotels (the latter venue equivalent to our clubs) in 1977, and recorded a local-label EP, Fair Game, within a short time. Fair Game netted the Sports a contract with Mushroom Records, who released the group’s first album, Reckless, which was in turn heard by Nick Lowe and Dave Robinson in England. Robinson signed the Sports to open for Graham Parker on his tour of Australia, and to record for Stiff in England, and those events brought the group to the notice of Arista, who signed the band for the U.S., and released their version (several alternate cuts) of the group’s second album, Don’t Throw Stones. Which Arista then supported by bringing the Sports to tour the American breadbasket, in the heart of Rock Recession ’79.

Steve Cummings is a bit awed by the Sports’ rapid traverse of the many oceans— liquid and psychic—between Melbourne, and the American Midwest he had known only in favorite authors like Ring Lardner, previously: “We had been playing in England, and I thought that we would be going back to Australia, but someone said we should tour the States, and I thought, well, I might never get a chance to see the U.S. again.” Personally I have a bit more confidence that the Sports will be passing this way again, but in the meantime, I undertake as much cultural exchange as possible.

We sort through the American stereotypes of Australian pop, ignoring obvious clay pigeons like the Bee Gees and Olivia Newton-John, to get down to celebrating the virtues of th.e Saints and Radio Birdman, recent but unsuccessful invaders of the U.S. charts. I make bold to crab about the Little River Band’s blandness, and y Cummings gives me the real Aussie poop on the L.R.B.: seems that back in their own land, the Little River Boys are regarded as crusty old studio hacks by power-poppers in the knbw (which would also tend to explain why they’ve done well with the Eaglesdeluded radio masses in this country).

TURN TO PAGE 59

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32

Cummings admits that the state of American rock radio has been his major disappointment during the Sports’ tour of Chuck Berry’s native land—Australia has only AM radio, which tends to program lowest-common-denominator rock, so everyone there assumes that FM must be the pop-panacea available to us Yanks along our streets of gold. However, Cummings reports that most of the American FM he’s heard so far sounds just like Australian AM, so l get to give him the good news as to just how complacent and boring commercial FM rock has become for us other ex-colonists.

Steve Cummings tells of good times in Toronto (“a great walking city”), and in New York City, where he enjoyed watching Cindy Wilson whale away at her bongoes at a B-52’s show, and was pleased to find some Car-label and other collectible records at a small shop. But Cummings also tells of taking another kind of constitutional in N.Y., walking out of a Blue Oyster Cult show from sheer boredom, before the band had even made it to “Don’t Fear The Reaper”; he seems somewhat apologetic over this anecdote, as though he, a foreigner, a guest of the U.S., had no business questioning the red, white, & Blue Oyster Cult’s five-year plan.

We’re still not sure about each other. When bassist Rob Glover comes to Cummings’ room to retrieve some gear from the closet, I take a quick glance inside to make certain these Aussies don’t have a kangaroo stashed there for post-concert unnatural acts (cf. Rolf Harris and his ca.-1963 U.S. hit about putting his ’roo in bondage, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport”). And when I ask Steve Cummings if he has any general impressions of the U.S., he begins, “I’ve noticed how so many Americans are so..J’, he hesitates, searching for the proper word to convey his observation, yet not offend this unknownquantity journalist sitting across fr6m him, “.. .so positive.” I don’t even need to cqnsult my Berlitz Australian-American dictionary to know that Steve was on the trail of “pushy” in that tenuous “positive”; I smile that he’s found us out so fast.

Steve Cummings seems almost too nice, as though he’s a character in one of his beloved Ray Davies’ songs, or maybe kind of a caricature of the antiheroic Davies himself. When I break the news to Cummings that we’re going to have to delay publishing this story a month, to give me time to fly to L.A. and do an exclusive interview with the **‘Knack*** (whose album,. I admit to him, hasn’t been nearly as emotionally (arresting for me as the Sports’), he’s all for me running off to & publicizing his rivals; he understands how these writing things are. What became of that intense, ferocious vocalist on Don't Throw Stones?

Over at Bogart’s, the mood is rather sombre and restrained tonight. After years of bemoaning their relatively unimportant station in the rock’n’roll universe, Cincinnati fans put themselves on the rock map for good last week, when eleven persons were crushed to death in a crowd trying to get into the Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum.

I can’t say what happened there, as I passed on a once-favorite. group and avoided the Who show from the time it was announced. I had begun to resent the Who as the big-rock darlings of the reactionary writers and disc jockeys determined to thwart the newer-wave rockers, and I also expected that the concert would be much too large an Event to be any real fun (though I hardly anticipated such tragically no-fun consequences for the fans who remained true believers).

Now, with charges and countercharges flying, with lawsuits starting to proliferate like anti-rock press releases, and with several upcoming Riverfront concerts cancelled, it’s suddenly hit the local fans that this humble-enough Sports/Sinceros date at Bogart’s might be their last chance to see national or, in this case, international rock’n’roll ^acts in Cincinnati for quite a while.

The Sinceros go on first to this unusually receptive audience, and make a good impression with what would appear to be an entertainingly varied stage presence any night of the week. Don Snow’s keyboards are pleasantly warp-factored in best devolutionary style, black bassist Ron Francois flashes London-calling punk/reggae contemporaneity, but most of all vocalist Mark Kjeldsen—taller than Limeys have any right to be, and sporting that absurdly dapper, Anthony Eden mustache—is a fine caricature of some classically arrogant r’n’r attitude we’ve known somewhere before.

Shortly after the Sinceros finish, the still-anonymous Sports wend their way through the audience to the stage. Steve Cumipings is anxious to get the show started, and rushes his introduction so that it comes out as self-effacing as I’d already found him back at the hotel. I catch only the words “Sports,” “Arista,” “down under,” and “in your atlas” in the blur of Cummings’ opening rap, but that turns out to be as perfect a thumbnail bio as the band could want.

The Sports seem a bit rocky and ill-meshed as they start their first song, and Cummings is demoniacally pacing the stage, this time as a Ray Davies character of the peripatetic variety. But the Sports quickly find their groove on “Suspicious Minds,” one of the highlights of Don't Throw Stones, and the shy Cummings suddenly becomes truly electric. He grabs the mike stand with Parkerilla fury, and jumps about in an abbreviated pogo, his legs pressed tightly together, his back and shoulders grand mal-stiff beneath his sport jacket and striped T-shirt. Andrew Pendlebury and Martin Armiger surround and support Cummings’ seizures with their fluid twin-guitar sound, which seems much more sophisticated in context than the cowboy corn that too often comes with dual-guitarring in American groups.

Steve Cummings’ unique stage presence appears to be as creatively “stiff’ as the label the Sports have recorded for in England; keeping his shoulders jammed rigidly together, Cummings jabs out with his forearm, driving home the extracted passion of his lyrics. He rushes headlong through some verses, frantically spitting out the words as fragments of his fervor. He contorts his lips around other lyrics, sensuously measuring out each syllable in the passionate, expressive style of Van Morrison. Cummings’ controlled -intensity vocal style also reminds me very much of Graham Parker; when I asked Cummings earlier whether his style had anything to do with touring with Parker, he demurred, but suggested that it might have something to do with his liking for Brinsley Schwarz (the base of Parker’s Rumour) in his youth.

Like many other Sports songs, the pumping “Live, Work & Play” concerns a protagonist made vaguely neurotic by modem life (cf. Talking Heads), but still determined to attack life with plenty of sly humor (again I have to go with the Kinks for .comparisons). As such, “Live Work & Play,” and “Who Listens to the Radio,” which follows it at Bogart’s, are great anthemic material for us existential types. It happens that “Who Listens to the Radio,” the nearest thing to a hit the Sports have managed in the States so far, is not only a week-late rhetorical question for the eleven concert victims who heard little but Whopromotionson their FM radios in the weeks preceding December 3rd, but a grisly pun as well.

But rock’n’roll’s still alive in Cincinnati tonight, and the fans are enthusiastic for the Sports, even if they haven’t gone down under in their atlases to search for Melbourne yet. As the audience demands an encore, I watch lead Sincero Mark Kjeldsen, who’s been standing near me through the latter half of the Sports’ set, quietly observing the crowd’s excitement over his tour mates. He suddenly decides to kid the encore petition along; he walks into the crowd, shouting, “Rock’n’roll! Rock’n’roll! That’s what you Americans like! Rock’n’roll...” Whereat a long-haired, chubby guy, shirtless beneath his bib overalls—Junior Samples at an early age—accosts Kjeldsen as an apparent fellow-spirit,. and drawls, “You got any ’ludes, man?” Kjeldsen stops in mid-shout, smiles at the credulity of these Yank troops, and says, “Sorry, no ’ludes.”

After the Sports have completed their encore, I catch up with the schizophrenically urgent Steve Cummings in Bogart’s dressing room. He’s back in his afternoon persona, shy and sensitive, sniffling with his cold, somewhat sheepish over his virtuoso stage performance of a few minutes before. Cummings and Pendlebury are snatching up their gear, desperate to get back to the hotel and a few hours’ sleep, before they have to rise again, and ride the 330 miles to St. Louis and their next show.

From St. Louis, the Sports will be heading for Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and (finally!) the big hop across the Pacific to their Australian homeland, where the waves and the sun should be just about perfect for some Christmas-day surfing, just like that English fellow Ray Davies promised so long ago.

Me? I’m sitting home in wintry Cincinnati, thoroughly enjoying reading The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner, a classic piece of American lit I’d never got around to until it was recommended to me by the Australian Steve Cummings, for its “sly humor.” As one of Lardner’s own characters might have put it, travel is so broadening (even when other people are doing if for you). Vie